Facts, despite all the talk about ‘fake news’, are still remarkably robust.
Surprisingly, perhaps even counter-intuitively, part of the evidence for this can be derived from Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is the bane of academics and the delight of firms making plagiarism detection software it provides a consistent fact base for online searchers.
There have been a number of shameful episodes in Australian history.
The dispossession of indigenous Australians and the many massacres committed against them will always be the worst of them. But the Australian treatment of East Timor (Timor Leste) will for years to come be regarded as a case study of Australian duplicity and consent to war crimes – all for a half a century of a determined attempt to procure benefits from Timor Strait oil and deliver some of it to the people who were the architects of the policy.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” A few days after posting last week’s effort about learning from history the blog picked up Timothy Snyder’s new book On Tyranny and the quote above was the book’s first line.
Snyder wrote the book Bloodlands which is an astonishing record of the death and destruction in Europe in the 20th century caused by Hitler and Stalin. In the latest book he applies his deep knowledge of the impact of tyranny on humanity and derives ‘Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century’ for those living today.
Much of what many of us believe is based on a series of stereotypes. Some of them are just mental short cuts but others are created by politicians, activists of all political shades, the media and even people who segment markets.
Research indicates that people have stereotypical views of Muslims, the unemployed, various national or ethnic groups and various socio-economic groups within their own nation or even suburb. Facts do little to dislodge the stereotypes in people’s minds – for instance Australians and Americans consistently over-estimate the percentage of Muslims in their countries. It is common – prompted by conservative governments – to believe that the unemployed are pot smoking slackers who don’t want to work. Pointing out the massive disparity between job vacancies and the number of unemployed does nothing to shake the stereotype’s hold on people’s beliefs.
A recent survey of Australian and New Zealand companies by the PR company, SenateSHJ, found that more than half of executives surveyed reported that reputation is now harder to manage than any other risks.
What the survey didn’t investigate was the extent to which company executives were themselves the source of reputational risks and damage. Two recent cases illustrate the problem. The first is the long running NBN saga. The NBN organisation – not content with offering an expensive second rate product – is now blaming its customers for the problems. Faced with consumer anger about slow speeds and high costs the company has blamed customers for not knowing what speed they are receiving and a lack of awareness of speed choices.
However much PR people go on about the various skills essential to PR practice there is one overwhelming pre-requisite – the need to write well. What makes it challenging is that the writing is usually not in the author’s voice but more frequently in the voices of many others.
Equally frequently many of those voices are using, and demanding, words which can only be regarded as utter claptrap. Once upon a time we called it jargon – a word which Shirley Hazzard, in her book We Need Silence to Find Out What we Think, said derived from ancient times and related to the twittering of geese. But now – along with capital T Twitter and business claptrap the geese sound like songbirds.
When British Prime Minister, John Major, looked for words to describe the sort of England he hoped for he turned to George Orwell’s description of “old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” from his essay: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.
It was an ironic choice given Orwell’s socialism and the once common assumption that the Anglican Church is the Tory party at prayer – a view that didn’t help Theresa May when she regularly referred to her vicar father’s influence. Almost a quarter of a century after Major’s comments visiting many Anglican churches makes it seem doubly ironic.
The following is the eulogy the blog delivered a year ago for his friend Don Macfarlane. It joined other eulogies by family, friends and colleagues and representatives of organisations he had generously helped.
I had lunch with Don on May 27.
On that Friday Don had just come from a meeting with a professor who was giving him advice about the next stages. The advice – focus on one thing. When I asked Don what his one thing would be his answer was – of course – painting.
One of the blog’s best friends died just over a year ago. Don’s family kindly agreed to the blog writing an obituary, with their assistance, which was published in The Age year. As a commemoration the blog republishes both the obituary and the eulogy the blog was honoured to be able to deliver at Don’s funeral service.
The blog is taking another maintenance break- on the blog not the site – but expect to be back in a few weeks.